Word: court
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ruling in a North Carolina divorce case (TIME, June 4, 1945), the court had left some 4,000,000 U.S. divorced persons facing-in the words of the dissenting Justice Black-possible "criminal prosecution and harassment." By the time the justices had threaded an uncertain way through the states' already mixed-up divorce laws there was, in the bitter words of one justice, "no longer any divorce law in the U.S." In one wage-hour ruling-that workers must be paid for time spent getting ready to work and walking through the plant to their jobs ("regardless of contrary...
Under the Robes. It was a court in shirtsleeves. There was nothing about it that was austere or remote. It was earnestly social-minded, close to workaday problems, generally measured its decision by the utilitarian yardstick of "the greatest good for the greatest number." The Nine were no respecters of economic and business traditions...
...members were ex-lawyers and ex-law professors; only two of them (Vinson and Rutledge, who had served on the Court of Appeals) had had any previous experience on the bench. As Supreme Court justices they were young (average age, 59)-Seven of them, the largest number of appointees by one President since Washington, owed their jobs to Franklin Roosevelt. The Nine in the order of their appointments...
...appointed twelve years ago in the midst of outraged objections when Black, an ex-police judge, later a U.S. Senator, had to admit that once he had joined the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama; now rated as one of the best-read, hardest working, most learned justices on the court...
William Orville Douglas, the court's youngest (50), who swears inelegantly, chews gum, scratches matches on the seat of his pants, and is an assertive, restless, billy-be-damned man who has often been discussed as a presidential possibility-and still doesn't consider himself politically entombed, even in the marble temple on Capitol Hill...